The Woman Who Knew Too Much

by Thomas Gifford

  “That’s what I’m tellin’ ya, man. A cheeseburger seven years old—”

  “Gross. Can he prove it?”

  “Ya look at it, you believe. Gross but neat. The thing is,” lowering his voice to a whisper, “I’m startin’ my own collection.”

  “Of what?”

  “Food. What else we talkin’ about, man? I mean, if it made this guy famous, got him on Letterman, why not me? I got a piece of Ray’s pepperoni pizza a week old already, you might call it the keystone of my collection, it’s where I’m startin’ from, buildin’ my collection from this simple piece of pizza—”

  “You actually know this famous guy, then?”

  “Well, I know a guy knows his roommate. We’re gonna go over to see his whole collection sometime. Got a nine-year-old piece of wedding cake.”

  “Really? Nine years old?”

  “Yeah, he says it’s already lasted five years longer than the marriage…”

  Celia went back to the main floor, where she set down the thirteen books on the counter.

  “Wow, you want all these?”

  “Here’s my Visa.”

  The guy behind the counter brushed long black hair out of his eyes with his fingertips. Celia had once had a typing teacher who made exactly the same gesture.

  “You must be a real mystery buff.”

  She watched the total rise as he flipped through the books, punching out half the list price.

  “Yes, I guess that’s what I am.”

  “Me too. Always thought I’d write one, but I never had the time—”

  “Takes more than time,” she said.

  “Think so?”

  “It’s hard, writing a mystery.” Then, without really thinking about it, she blurted out: “I’m writing one myself.”

  “Hey, really? That’s great. I suppose you’re right, I could never concentrate that long, like we’ve got this nut in the basement here. You’re not gonna believe this, he’s collecting old food. Like art. Now that doesn’t take any concentration … well, let’s see here, you’re putting quite a dent in a hundred bucks.”

  She left the bookstore, stood blinking in the sunlight, waiting to cross. She couldn’t believe it, but she kept hearing the words.

  I’m writing one myself.

  She felt as if she’d slipped out of gear and the motor was racing. She’d never actually said it before, without qualifiers and conditional clauses hanging all over the place. But now, out of the blue, she’d just said it.

  She lugged her books in the red-and-white Strand bag over to the drugstore, where she picked up some toothpaste and a new brush. A girl of ten or so with blond hair in two pigtails tied with blue yarn was tugging at her mother’s skirt, pointing at Celia. Celia smiled down at her. The big blues were stuck on Celia’s face.

  “You’re the cough-syrup fairy.”

  “Me?”

  “Mommy, the cough-syrup fairy!”

  The woman smiled at Celia. “You are—”

  Celia shook her head and smiled. Not me, she thought, testing the words in her head, I’m a writer.

  The girl gazed up at her, ducking behind her mother’s skirt.

  “Louanne, she looks like the fairy. But she knows who she is. Don’t you?” She winked at Celia.

  “I’m not altogether sure,” Celia said.

  She left the drugstore and walked on the sunny side of the street, feeling determined and fresh and even a little silly.

  It was time she sat down with Linda Thurston.

  Chapter Three

  CELIA LIVED IN TWO rooms, one tiny, one immense, in a building on Tenth Street near Fifth Avenue. It was on the historical registry—the building, not her apartment, which had been created in the late sixties by knocking out a couple of walls, relocating a bathroom, and raising the ceiling, which had inexplicably been dropped in the fifties. No decade had a lock on the inexplicable.

  Celia did almost all her living in the big room. And most of the living centered on the ornate pool table which, with its slate bed, had required the services of four men and a crane and had pretty well tied up traffic the day it was installed. The men who came later in the week at the landlord’s request had listened to the house with stethoscopes and concluded that there probably wasn’t any structural damage. Still, she would be well advised to listen for excessive creaking in the walls and under the floorboards. And for the next few months she heard nothing but excessive creaking. In the end she learned to live with it, like San Franciscans and Love Canalites.

  A carpenter had built a top that fit on the pool table, making it her desk, her dining table, and with the addition of an air mattress, her guest bedroom. There were a couple of long, deep couches, a fireplace, white brick walls, just under eight miles of books, an enormous pretend-Oriental rug, and a galley kitchen backed into a faraway corner. There was a long three-bulbed lamp hanging over the table with three green glass shades and all brass hardware. Like the table itself, it was very old and had belonged to her paternal grandfather, who had owned a poolroom in the Chicago Loop.

  When she banged in the door, she awakened Ed-the-Mean, who came at her in a frantic flurry of purplish blue like a very scary special effect or a demon from the void of eternity. She had been through it all before. She stood her ground.

  “Ed, you’re not only mean and dumb, you’re one silly ass. Now get out of my way!”

  She dropped the bag of books on the table.

  She watched Ed, standing quietly now by a bookcase that was spilling its guts onto the floor.

  Someday Ed was going to raise hell with the wrong guy and wind up in the next morning’s trash.

  She put her tape of Gilda into the VCR and got it going. It wasn’t absolutely her favorite movie, but it was close, up there with Dead Reckoning and The Blue Dahlia and Murder, My Sweet and Out of the Past and The Big Sleep and Ride the Pink Horse. She’d fallen asleep the night before, had clicked the movie off with the remote control. Now it picked right up near the end, when Glenn Ford sees the mysterious louvered window in the nightclub’s office closing, and knows that George Macready isn’t dead after all but back from the watery grave, with Rita Hayworth on his mind…

  She watched the end, then rewound it and started it again. Then she went to the closet in her tiny bedroom and brought a large cardboard box back to the couch.

  Inside it lived Linda Thurston.

  Ed-the-Mean cocked his head and peered down from the mantelpiece as she emptied the box and spread Linda all over the Oriental rug. Celia leaned back against the couch and surveyed the file folders, the notebooks, the loose pages, the newspaper clippings, the three-by-five and four-by-six file cards in a rainbow of colors—all of which added up to one Linda Thurston.

  Linda Thurston, the heroine of the unwritten mystery novels she’d contemplated for so long. The heroine of so many incarnations across the years. Celia hadn’t told more than a half-dozen people about Linda. Hilary Sampson, Debbie Macadam, Paul Landover in the flush of newly married ultimate-secret telling, Joel Goldman, maybe a couple of others …

  She poured a glass of Chablis, checked Gilda to make sure the story hadn’t changed, glared at Ed-the-Mean with eyes that said if-you-dare-even-think-of-shitting-on-the-floor-you-die, and turned back to Linda.

  Celia had imagined her in a variety of guises as the years and manners and mores had marched onward. She’d been a tough, perky, driven Civil Rights marcher and anti-Vietnam War protestor in the sixties; a tough, perky, driven reporter like Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome in the seventies; a tough etcetera muckraking newspaper woman; a tough blah-blah lawyer defending wronged underdogs; a ditto actress…

  All those Lindas had taken their places in the cardboard box, and finally one day the real Linda had appeared, as if she’d been waiting all along for the right moment, like a Botticelli Venus rising from the note cards. She emerged from Celia’s own life and imagination, but was not Celia herself from the world of theatre, not an actress.

  Linda had begun
as a newspaper feature writer, then become a drama critic because of both her education and inclination. From there she’d hopped into a spot as a TV drama critic, largely due to her personal style. Subsequently, because of her love of the sweaty, gritty, greasepainty world of theatre itself, she went to work for one of the great regional theatres in administration—first in PR, then as assistant to the company manager, then as a fund-raiser, then even getting her feet wet directing a summer touring show; one job after another.

  And with each new job a new mystery would present itself, sometimes a murder, but sometimes something more subtle—financial skullduggery on the board of directors, the undermining of the theatre’s eccentric founder, a poison-pen letter writer driving a well-known guest star to a nervous breakdown. Celia had seen just about everything but murder in the companies where she’d done time, and this most recent version of Linda Thurston had seemed so right.

  Celia had outlined the first Linda novel a couple of years before, but had then spent nearly all of the next two years working hard at her acting, with not enough energy left to spend on writing. But now, now she might just make the time while the Kladstrup Koff Kandy fairy paid the bills. She had a plot and a title, Murder in the Round. It was the story of a woman who’d founded a theatre and was renowned for bringing the men in her life—actors, directors, authors, critics, moneymen—to heel in the most peculiar ways. Celia had watched the woman in action, more or less, and knew her inside out. It seemed like a promising beginning.

  She worked at the covered pool table, perched on a stool, hunched over a pad of graph paper, sketching in the outlines of her novel, jotting down the events of the first few chapters, the aspects of character and setting to be revealed therein, the point each action was to make. It was satisfying but exhausting work, and after three hours of it she looked up, feeling red-eyed and stiff, her facial muscles aching from grim determination. She leaned back, stretched, and got up to take the long concluded Gilda out of the VCR.

  She went to the kitchen counter and ground coffee beans, brewed a fresh pot, and while waiting for it, talked to Ed-the-Mean.

  He was an Anodorhynchus Hyacinthinus, more commonly known as a Hyacinth Macaw, at about three-and-a-half feet from stem to stern the biggest goddamn parrot in the known universe. Ed happened not only to be slothful but truculent, particularly in the presence of the unknown or unwary. He was also such a beautiful creature that Celia sometimes came near to crying just looking at him—when she wasn’t mad at him.

  He was, for the most part, a deep, unique blend of purple and blue, with a periophthalmic ring of golden yellow and a small naked yellow streak along the base of the lower mandible. Ed was a native of western Bolivia. The bird books described his kind as “not shy,” which in Ed’s case was so far from understatement it bordered on criminal. Normally the hyacinth macaw is thought to be unusually gentle, intelligent, and affectionate, but the standard reference work also observes that he is “fierce toward strangers.” Ha! Enter Ed-the-Mean.

  The grayish-black beak is not merely large. With three hundred pounds of biting pressure per square inch, a human finger, for example, is child’s play. A snack. Ed, for exercise Celia assumed, frequently amused himself by turning pool cues into neat little bits of kindling. He was also a roguish free spirit. His cage, an enormous affair made of welded and bolted steel which had cost seven hundred dollars—still making it only a fraction of what Ed himself had cost—was only a toy. He regularly let himself out in the morning, and when the mood was upon him, locked himself back in at night. As a companion on lonely evenings he was almost ideal: he didn’t say much, but was a good listener. And while she waited for the coffee, he came and pushed against her hand, a cat wanting to be stroked.

  Celia cooed to him: “You are a big bad birdie, a disgrace to your gentle, intelligent, affectionate race. Naturally, I love you. On the other hand, I rather resent the fact that you will outlive me.” He clucked happily. “I love you, unless, that is, you do naughty on my kitchen counter. In which case, I will kill you.” Ed clucked derisively, knowing she didn’t have the nerve, wouldn’t have a chance if it came to hand-to-hand combat. She was only a woman, and he seemed to know perfectly well that she’d have trouble biting through a swizzle stick.

  She sat with her steaming mug of coffee and emptied the bag of books onto the floor around her. She’d put a Rockford Files tape on the VCR, which meant seven or eight episodes could run without interruption. She loved The Rockford Files. She’d actually been featured in a couple of them, once as a girl good old Jimbo got mildly stuck on. Jill Clayburgh was starring in this one, and some village thugs were giving Jimbo the usual rough time.

  Eventually she began looking at the books, reading the first page or two of each, getting a feel for the story and the approach. She was just enjoying herself in an uncomplicated way when she picked up Miles Warriner’s Littlechild Takes Aim. She’d never read any of Inspector Littlechild’s adventures, and friends assured her it was time. She flipped the front cover back and watched a sheet of white paper slide out, flutter to the floor between her outstretched legs.

  It was probably another press release that accompanied review copies. She’d already come across several in this single batch of books. She picked it up, glanced at it in passing.

  It wasn’t a press release.

  It was a letter. Sort of.

  She read it. She put it down and shivered. She picked it up and read it again. It didn’t take long. It was short.

  She looked at Ed, who seemed about to fall asleep on the mantelpiece.

  “Holy shit,” she said. Her voice was shaking.

  Ed blinked sleepily.

  She went to refill her coffee cup, came back and read the damn thing again, trying to believe it was a joke. She tried to put as many interpretations on it as possible, but there wasn’t much leeway.

  MM

  In re the murder of the Director.

  1. Door unlocked.

  2. Working west wing.

  3. D in study. Dan Rather.

  4. Prowler shoots.

  5. Trunk.

  6. Rolls.

  7. Clean getaway.

  8. Try not to be STUPID!

  9. 21. 7. Don’t forget.

  Z.

  She felt as if Linda Thurston had just taken shape and was reading over her shoulder. It was eerie, and of course absurd, but she took a minute to rid herself of the feeling. Sure, she was alone. But Linda was like a genie: Once she got out of her box it was going to be trouble getting her back in.

  What would Linda Thurston do if she found such a letter of intended murder?

  To begin with, she’d make her hands stop trembling.

  Then she’d try to figure out exactly what it meant.

  Who was M.M.?

  Who was the Director?

  What did Dan Rather have to do with it?

  What Prowler?

  What trunk?

  Who needed Rolls? This didn’t sound like a coffee break …

  What was 21? 7?

  Who was Z?

  And who the hell was that knocking at the door?

  Chapter Four

  HILARY SAMPSON, A LANKY redhead with hair cut the length of your thumb and eyes of pearl gray separated by a freckled nose, was standing at the door in her dark blue Auxiliary Police uniform, billed cap pulled low on her forehead. She was holding a yellow plastic bag from Hunan Royal on Sixth Avenue. Dinner.

  She’d finished her evening’s patrol and as usual made her final stop at Celia’s, though in her excitement at thinking about Linda Thurston, Celia had let the custom slip her mind. Hilary always used the key Celia had given her in case of emergencies.

  Hilary was at her best in emergencies, whether you were in need of a nightstick, the paramedics, or the Heimlich Maneuver. She’d once given mouth to mouth resuscitation to a drunk fallen in a stupor outside Steve’s Ice Cream at Tenth and Sixth, saved his life, and managed not to throw up afterward. She’d once given E
d a swat with her nightstick, following which his greetings became markedly less effusive. A friend had once given her a framed sampler with daffodils and bunny rabbits embroidered around the words DON’T FUCK WITH ME. Hilary hung it on the closet door in her tiny front hall.

  “Cold sesame noodle, chicken in garlic sauce, orange beef,” she said, proceeding to the pool table. “Evening, Ed, how they hanging?”

  While Celia brought in the bottle of Chablis from the fridge and another glass, Hilary looked at the mess on the floor and shook her head. “Do my eyes deceive me or have you decided to be a writer again?”

  Celia went back to the kitchen for chopsticks. Hilary opened the little white pasteboard containers. Celia went back to the kitchen yet again, her mind racing with other things, and returned with plates and paper napkins.

  “More like a detective,” Celia said.

  Hilary rolled the pearls heavenward. “Oh, Ed, what has she done now?”

  “You eat,” Celia said. “I’ll talk. The craziest thing has happened.”

  She told her the story of the day, how Debbie Macadam had gotten her thinking about being trapped and wanting escape routes, about Linda Thurston. She told her about how Joel had tried to convince her that the career was going strong, and making perfect sense, and she really ought to do this or that in some faraway place, on and on through an infinity of mirrors. She told her how she’d gone down the street and seen Vanessa Redgrave, then gone to the Strand and quite unexpectedly announced to a total stranger that she was writing a mystery. And she had practically lied to a little girl who’d identified her as the cough syrup fairy.

  Hilary listened intently while bravely fighting it out, chopsticks versus sesame noodles, casually using a finger when it was required. Ed watched the finger while pretending to groom a wing, seeming to calculate his chances, knowing perfectly well he was overmatched against that damn log she’d once hit him with.

  Having calmed herself about everything else, Celia finally came to the murder letter. She handed it to Hilary. “You read, now I’ll eat.”

  Hilary read. Her eyebrows slowly rose. She took a long drink of wine. Eventually she picked up Warriner’s Littlechild Takes Aim, shook it by the covers to see if more goodies might emerge. None did. She leafed through the pages, stopped at the title page for an extra moment, then closed the book.